Son[i]a
Artist, composer and researcher Edwin van der Heide expands musical composition and musical language in spatial, interactive, and interdisciplinary directions. His often site-specific, highly immersive installations don’t just take up space: they are a very deliberate inquiry into space itself and into its affordances as an artistic medium and material. Edwin’s pieces create space, modifying its actual and perceived boundaries. They make space present, apparent, and even tangible. In this podcast, we talk to Edwin about art in public space, air pressure, sounds under water, loudspeakers, networks, odd spatial experiences, and sonic phenomenology.
In this podcast, we talk to philosopher Andrea Soto Calderón about images and power, about the material imagination, desire, and oikonomia. Walking barefoot along this path, we come across minor architectures and silent revolutions. We also consider the possibility of a different geometry of politics, one that turns its back on basic categories of thought such as “fixing”, “establishing” and “substantiating” in favour of inexplicable notions that simultaneously are and are not. Taking this idea further, Andrea suggests replacing the idea of “strategy” and thinking instead about “ways of doing”.
In this podcast we talk to with writer and researcher Andrea Valdés about pure writing, about heterodoxy, and about spatial optimism. We open up the metaphor of soft tools, and the semantic resonance of organs—be they tongues or genitals—trapped by the technological rudiments of machines. We discuss the use of tape recorders, orality and writing, and the research of Rivolta Femminile self-awareness groups, which tried to find a space for a different kind of speech in a private, female-only environment. The conversation was recorded at Hangar in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, as one of the first moves towards a line research that Andrea had continued to work on to this day.
We sat down with curator and researcher Grant Watson to talk about textiles and their material and social ramifications. Instead, we ended up talking about his interview-based practice, essentially producing an extremely meta interview on interviews and interviewing. In this podcast, Grant talks about enacting, editing, demographics, transference, capturing the atmosphere of an interview, and other issues that he explores in one of his main ongoing projects, How We Behave.
Hablamos con la artista Andrea Francke sobre su interés en las infraestructuras y proyectos participativos. Inclusión, hospitalidad y los ecos del proyecto colonial aparecen en la conversación. Andrea va deshaciendo la idea de fracaso mientras reflexiona acerca de los desafíos que conlleva la elaboración de políticas y marcos legales institucionales. Hablamos también de categorías de arte importadas, de trabajos invisibles y de la idea de caridad como un callejón sin salida.
Curator, artist and cultural producer Eva Rowson talks about her early contact with hospitality, collective learning experiences such as Open School East, the value of uncharismatic work, throwing parties with Andrea Francke, life lessons of a croissant, and how the best theory comes from practice.
In this podcast, scholar and curator Olga Goriunova talks about the shelf life of marketing data, about legal persons and digital subjects, reading statistics as poetry, and the many mysteries of personalised targeting. Olga’s concept of Digital Subjects looks at how machine learning crunches data from search engine queries, e-commerce, social network activity and more into categories... to further enhance marketing tactics, political communication and similar practices.
Cultural worker, researched and artist Daniel Gasol describes himself as a “faggot child of the proletariat and cultural worker,” not (just) to provoke a response, but as a carefully calibrated strategy, fully aware that it immediately highlights the class privilege that informs any contemporary artistic practice and possibility of being. In this podcast, makes an against-the-grain reading of Spain’s Vagrancy Law (1933-1970) and Law of Social Danger (1970-1995) through the prism of class, in which he reviews literature and criminal records from the National Archive of Catalonia in order to show the criminalisation of the underprivileged classes and of the proletarian body.
Teresa Lanceta is an artist, art historian, researcher, and teacher. In this conversation, the sense of touch reclaims space from the gaze. At the same time, we recover the wisdom of weaving in terms of community, as an open source code for those who know and perform it. And through this repetitive, necessary gesture, technique becomes form, and form becomes language. Thus the margins disappear and give way to rhombuses, torn bits, darning, mending... depending on what’s going on at that moment in time.
We talk to Argentinian writer and researcher Flavia Dzodan about fashion, opulence, peripheries, phrenology, taxonomies, canons of beauty, luxury fakes, and migrant detention centres. An intense journey that touches on her personal history and includes references to other writers, notes on her methodology, and a few potshots at centres of power.